The other package we had submitted early June is failed as well due to having a more organized folder structure than the suggested one. I honestly didn’t bother scrolling down the PDF as soon as I saw that one fail note. Feels so bad to comply inappropriate guidelines that both sellers and buyers are suffering from. So that’s two packages we’re not attempting to “fix” atm.
That’s actually true. I’m not saying quality should be dropped, but spending countless hours fixing tiny issues rises the prices of the assets. Also, guys, you have to realize, with ue4 being free, our target customers are indie devs and hobbyists. They expect less and want to spend less. Furthermore, even if a model is of exceptional quality, there is a shelf life. Once it makes it in too many steam greenlight games, it becomes unpopular.
The one aforementioned is priced at $24.99 for 16 photogrammety assets… Edit: Also, as said, the package was already accepted months ago. Really, how many times do these packages get inspected? Thumbs up for the quality control at Epic, but guys have a break (and cut us some slack).
Reading all of this is really disheartening. Epic Games has for the longest time been my hands-down favourite developer alongside Westwood*(RIP)*. But seeing all of this it just feels like an absolute and utter disregard for people trying to make their engine more appealing to indie devs and like Chrisis said - hobbyists.
I applaud Epic for wanting to maintain superb quality something of which they are probably most reputable for, but sometimes great or even good is enough. But content creators should not have to wait months upon months to hear anything regarding their submissions. I can understand giving a timeframe is hard, but flatout ignoring them is nothing other than despicable. And you’re doing it to people that help make your engine even better and more versatile.
This is the first time I think anything that Epic does is pathetic and outright disgusting. This whole process MUST be re-organized. Submissions taking longer to be reviewed is obvious, but updates to content already on the marketplace should not take weeks upon weeks. You’re asking people that help you make revenue to spend even more time and effort solely to comply with unrealistic guidelines. No wonder so many projects aren’t seeing updates anymore, they lose motivation and move on to other things. The only one here to blame is Epic for poor management of guidelines and requirements for assets to be accepted and/or updated.
I don’t think the marketplace represents Epic as a developer or as a whole. It’s certainly no reason to think less of the cool stuff they make. But personally, to me the ue4 marketplace isn’t functional or even well-thought out. I still have the feeling it was forged as a quick response to the assetstore with a pinch of “but we need to make it better”, and with time that pinch just pinched the whole thing.
I mean the marketplace has been up for like, what, 3 years now. If folder structure is so important, how come in these three years no one spared the dev resources to develop an automatic folder re-structurer based on the reference tree of given packs and an xml file specified by the customer/ dev studio. Why force any specific folder structure? This could be annoying for a large studio purchasing many packs. Or why isn’t there a tool to automatically build the overview map and all its contents. Heck, we could use a tool to tell us of possible flaws with our submissions before we submit and wait for a few months to hear back, you know. Or a tool to gather all the technical data, even that would be cool. And while on it, it could be useful to have some kind of a way to actually preview a pack before purchasing. Or larger studios/ devs who have made more than a 1000 bucks worth of purchases could be given the privilege to trial a pack. I’m just saying the marketplace doesn’t have to be a copy pasta of the assetstore with “more strict rules”, it could be a lot more. Unity is partially what it is today because of the assetstore.
Furthermore, for some reason I personally do not think of packs as “sold”. This is sometimes a very successful strategy on the assetstore: people release a pack for a relatively low price and keep building and adding stuff, increasing the price. We’ve purchased many such assets and it’s nice to come back and see extra models in there or a bunch of improvements. But really, one would have to crazy to do this on the marketplace. Releasing an update for a pack on the marketplace is the equivalent of NASA trying to upgrade a shuttle while it’s already in space…
The Marketplace is currently being reworked. there will be soon a new Seller Portal. A beta is about to happen… I’ve heard that Epic is willing to let publishers decide of their release date… I bet this new seller portal will give you the status of your submission and a “grayed out” greenlight button that will unlock once your submission is fully reviewed/approved and ready for release. Press the button… click confirm… boom!!! it’s live!!! 
how about that. I also have this idea that they didn’t want to release anything for real until this beta test is done… Mean they were piling up the approved submissions and wait for the publishers to release them on their own and see any problems / bugs / issues arising. Just how I feel about that…
We actually was that crazy about marketplace and gave it all we had. We released Affordable Landscapes 1 with 5 landscapes. We did free monthly updates for about 1 year and a half and eventually temporary gave up because it does more harm to us than acceptable, all over trying to honor our audience with free updates. Promising your audience updates and on the other hand not having a clue when the update actually gets released isn’t a good thing. With Epic being in charge of processing refunds every time a buyer has a legit claim, it’s not understandable why they simply don’t let the sellers worry about their own pockets. What’s the worst thing that could happen? someone would manage to upload his birthday video instead of ue4 files? anything wrong will burn the seller himself only.
The new seller portal is a nice thing. But still, why the absolutely zero communication on the forums and specially in creator’s hub? I really these little automations result in seeing more communication and faster response times.
This truly deserves respect!
If anything, at least people can be confident in the hard work that goes into marketplace packs…